Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel (14 page)

Before leaving, Amir asked Rachel if she would come on one of the weekend outings he was organizing for students in the West Bank and Gaza to lecture on mysticism and astrology. She said she would consider it.

Outside, the balmy Mediterranean summer was already well under
way. June marked the official start of beach season, when lifeguards began manning the raised huts posted all along the shoreline. In Tel Aviv, even on a weekday evening, it wasn’t unusual to see men and women walking back from the beach in nothing but their bathing suits, carrying folded beach chairs or bags of food. The drama and the bloodletting that Rabin’s peacemaking let loose had been playing out far away from this secular metropolis. Even on days of horrific violence, the cafés in the city teemed with hipsters and old-timers, tycoons and intellectuals. The zealots and the fundamentalists lived elsewhere.

At the end of June, the judicial commission investigating the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs issued its findings. Most were unsurprising. Goldstein had conducted the killing spree alone without informing even his wife of his intentions. The testimony of Palestinian witnesses who said there may have been a second shooter in the prayer hall did not hold up to scrutiny. The five-man panel, headed by Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar, recommended separate prayer hours for Jews and Muslims at the shrine. Under no circumstances should both groups be inside the Cave of the Patriarchs at the same time.

The probe did turn up details that helped explain why Goldstein had no trouble getting into the hall and killing so many Palestinians. On the morning of the massacre, only five soldiers or policemen were present at their posts instead of the requisite ten. The others failed to wake up for guard duty. One of the closed-circuit cameras didn’t operate and the others covered only parts of the shrine.

When the panel asked soldiers what they do when seeing settlers firing at Palestinians, their answer struck Shamgar as troubling: Most were under the impression that the rules of engagement forbade them from shooting at fellow Jews. So even if a soldier had entered the Muslim prayer hall and seen Goldstein gunning down the worshippers, it’s not clear that he would have stopped the attack. Here the commission had stumbled on a paradox of Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza. International law mandated that Israel protect the occupied population—the Palestinians. But in reality, the soldiers were there to guard the settlers. The commission instructed the army to remind
troops of their duty to protect innocents on both sides. “The law must be enforced with rigor, decisiveness and equality, against anyone who breaks it,” the report said.

In their testimony to the commission, intelligence officials stressed the difficulty of thwarting an attack by a lone gunman. All the methods of intelligence gathering, including surveillance and undercover work, relied on the would-be assailant including others in his plan. “The prospect of identifying this lone gunman in advance and finding out something about the time and place he intends to stage his attack is a near impossibility,” the panel wrote, summarizing the testimony of agency chiefs. The officials would find themselves making precisely the same argument to another commission in the not-too-distant future.

Referring to Goldstein, the commission wrote:

The objective he set for himself justified any and all means. The extremeness of his positions meant he recognized neither the supremacy of the law nor the total authority of the state’s institution. . . . He saw himself as an emissary of the Nation of Israel, commanded to operate according to the will of the Creator. . . . He became determined, as far as we can tell, to carry out an action so horrific and excessive that it would halt the peace process, which he saw as the ultimate danger.

Had Amir read the report, he would surely have recognized himself in those lines.

IF CLINCHING THE
Gaza-Jericho deal had seemed to restore some energy to the peace process, events in July 1994 put it in full swing again. Arafat moved from Tunis to Gaza, setting up his headquarters at the Palestine Hotel on the beach. The peripatetic icon now had a territory to run. Rabin met openly for the first time with Jordan’s King Hussein amid a push for a peace treaty by the end of the year. It would be the first between Israel and an Arab country since the historic
agreement with Egypt in 1979. Even the negotiations between Israel and Syria seemed to show some promise, with President Hafez al-Assad agreeing to one-on-one talks between the Israeli and Syrian ambassadors to Washington.

The economy was looking up as well. A combination of the peacemaking and the influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union had put Israel’s GDP on track to grow by nearly 7 percent in 1994. And while the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange had fluctuated in recent months, the TA-25, the market’s most important index, had climbed nearly 20 percent since the summer of 1992, when Rabin first took office. Some years before Rabin’s election, Treasury officials had repealed a widely hated exit tax, making it easier for more Israelis to travel abroad. Now, as prolonged heat waves grew unbearable through the summer, they did so in record numbers.

Amir had no travel plans. With school out, he got a job as an armed guard at a summer camp run by the Jewish National Fund, a group that American Jews know for its fund-raising and tree-planting. Amir had a few thousand shekels in the bank—about a thousand dollars—some of which he was giving to a Haredi charity in small monthly installments. He might have made more money interning at a law office but the idea held no appeal. He’d put away his textbooks for the summer and was reading a novel his brother had recommended instead: Frederick Forsyth’s thriller
The Day of the Jackal
.

The book is a fictional account of a right-wing group’s effort to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle over his decision to end the war in Algeria and withdraw French forces. France’s colonization of Algeria differed markedly from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza—it had been under way for more than 130 years when Algeria finally gained independence in 1962. But to anyone steeped in French history, Rabin’s circumstances in the 1990s would have seemed remarkably similar to de Gaulle’s in the waning years of colonial rule in Algeria. Both men were war heroes who surprised their public by embracing peace programs. Both came to be seen as traitors by a segment of their countrymen—settlers and other right-wingers—for their willingness to cede territory. And both refused to take the threats against their personal safety seriously. Though the plot
to kill de Gaulle as rendered in
The Day of the Jackal
is made up, the French leader survived several real assassination attempts.

Yigal Amir likely saw himself in the character of the assassin, an Englishman identified only by his code name, the Jackal. Cool and methodical, he reconnoiters Paris for the ideal spot to kill the president. A subplot revolves around his acquisition of a custom-made sniper rifle with a silencer, a section rich with the kind of technical detail that would have appealed to Hagai.

But to the extent that the French backlash against de Gaulle resonated with Amir, the comparison had its limits. Resistance to France’s withdrawal from Algeria centered on issues of heritage and national pride. “Algeria is French and will remain so,” was the slogan of the Organisation de l’armée secrète, the dissident paramilitary group that fought to scuttle Algerian independence.

Amir framed his fanatical resistance to an Israeli withdrawal almost entirely in religious terms and specifically in the context of God’s biblical 613 commandments. He liked to describe these commandments, which ranged from dos and don’ts about prayer and idol worship to long-outdated doctrines on animal sacrifice, as his “instruction manual” for life. “My own morality doesn’t matter. It is determined solely according to the Torah itself,” he would eventually explain. To Amir, as to other Jewish fundamentalists, the Old Testament was literal, word-for-word truth. “The Torah is the brain. If the Torah tells you to do something that runs counter to your emotions, you do what runs counter to your emotions.”

As long as the peace process sputtered, Amir allowed himself to deliberate, alone or with his brother, on the options for ensuring its failure. But now that it was in gear again, his resolve to kill Rabin grew stronger. He thought about it every day. In contemplating the religious justification for such an act, Amir focused on a Talmudic principle known as
rodef
. The concept referred to a person who pursues another person with the intent to kill him—
rodef
meaning literally “pursuer.” The law of the pursuer, or
din rodef
, permitted a bystander to kill the aggressor in order to save the innocent victim. It was one of the few circumstances in which the Talmud allowed extrajudicial killing.

Amir decided that Rabin fit the definition of
rodef
—he was a pursuer—because his policies were undermining the safety of settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. In his logic, Rabin was effectively chasing them down with the intent to kill them. He also decided that Rabin was a
moser
, a person who handed over Jews to a hostile power, in this case the newly formed Palestinian Authority. In truth, of course, all the settlers remained under Israeli rule, subject solely to Israeli law, including those in Gaza, which Arafat now controlled.
Din moser
also mandated death for the offender.

If his conclusions seemed like a stretch, Amir was certainly not the only person scouring the Talmud for laws that Rabin might be violating. By now, questions about
din rodef
and
din moser
had already surfaced in the Haredi press and been discussed in religious seminaries. The majority of Israelis would remain unfamiliar with these terms for some time to come. But in the religious world they had slipped into common usage.

In yeshivas, these discussions may have had a theoretical quality to them, as if the question of
din rodef
and whether it applied to Rabin possessed some scholarly value. But Amir, true to both his character and his zealous brand of faith, interpreted them literally. If
din rodef
applied, he was permitted to kill Rabin—not just permitted but obligated to do so. The possibility of being jailed or killed had no bearing. “There’s no such thing as cognitive dissonance with me. The moment my consciousness . . . reaches a certain conclusion, I have no weakness, no compulsion about doing it. And the actions go accordingly. I don’t flinch from things,” he would say later. “One of the guidelines of Judaism is to suppress the body and the bodily urges and the emotional needs. . . . The goal is to control entirely the emotions and not to let the emotions guide you.”

In the broader landscape of right-wing opposition to Rabin, the
din rodef
phenomenon represented only a fraction of the goings on. But it captivated a certain population because of its scriptural certainty and because the rest of the right seemed to be flailing around ineffectively in trying to counter Rabin’s historic advances.

Benjamin Netanyahu led the political thrust as head of the largest opposition party, Likud. “Bibi,” as nearly everyone referred to him,
was the brother of Yonatan Netanyahu, a national hero who died in the Entebbe rescue operation in 1976. He became a figure in his own right while serving in diplomatic posts in Washington and at the United Nations, with his fluent English and his skill for making Israel’s case in clean rhetorical strikes. The exposure in the United States helped Netanyahu hurdle over some formidable Likud figures to win the party leadership in early 1993. But a year later, he still struggled to impose discipline on the notoriously unruly party.

In part it was the American aura he exuded. Netanyahu had become a favorite of the US media in the ’80s, a regular guest on Ted Koppel’s
Nightline
program, where his sound-bite mastery helped soften the edges on his hardline views. Larry King, the CNN talk-show host, considered Netanyahu one of his best recurring guests, especially appealing to women, an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. “If he had a sense of humor, he’d be a ten,” he told a journalist profiling Netanyahu for
Vanity Fair
.

But in Hebrew, the rhetoric came across as glib and artificial. During Netanyahu’s primary campaign against Likud stalwarts, rumors swirled that he’d been having an affair and that a videotape existed of his hotel-room dalliance with the other woman. To counter possible blackmail, Netanyahu confessed publicly to the infidelity and accused an unnamed “party higher-up surrounded by underworld figures” of plotting against him. In other countries, it might have been seen as a shrewd preemptive measure. But in Israel’s macho political culture, the strategy backfired. Instead of getting credit for coming clean, Netanyahu looked to many Israelis like a chump who succumbs easily to pressure. In the widely invoked Yiddish term, he was a
freier
, a sucker—one of the worst things you can be in Israeli politics.

After the Oslo deal was signed, Netanyahu struggled to formulate an alternative policy. Some members of his party thought he should tack to the center and embrace at least parts of the agreement as the new reality. Certainly, few Israelis felt an attachment to the Gaza Strip, where nearly one million Palestinians lived mostly in poverty. As Rabin drew closer to peace with Jordan in the summer of 1994, these more pragmatic voices in Likud grew louder. An agreement with Jordan would have none of the contentiousness of the deals with
the Palestinians. Moshe Katzav, a popular member of Likud who would later hold the ceremonial post of president, warned that Rabin’s achievements would make the right wing irrelevant. “The Likud has got to come to terms with the irrevocability of the policies undertaken by the Rabin government,” Katzav said.

Instead, Netanyahu aligned himself with the hardliners, the settlers and the rabble-rousers, speaking at rallies across the country where crowds branded Rabin a traitor and a murderer, and consorting with rabbis who’d urged soldiers to disobey evacuation orders. At least once, Netanyahu gently scolded an audience for its inflammatory rhetoric. “We have an issue with political adversaries, not enemies,” he said from the podium. But more often, he ignored it. Occasionally he seemed swept up in it.